Call centers distribute telephone calls and other types of communications to available customer service representatives, referred to herein as “agents,” using well-known automatic call distribution techniques. In a call surplus condition, where there are more incoming calls than agents available to process the incoming calls, the call center maintains one or more call queues to maintain the received incoming calls in an active state until an agent with the necessary skill becomes available to process the incoming call
Call centers often employ interactive voice response (IVR) systems to efficiently provide callers with information in the form of recorded messages and to obtain information from callers using keypad or voice responses to recorded queries. The IVR systems are often referred to as “automated agents” or “virtual agents.” Existing call centers, such as the CONVERSANT® System for Interactive Voice Response, commercially available from Avaya Inc., are typically implemented as centralized server-based interactive customer service solutions. A number of IVR systems employ the Voice eXtensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) to create IVR scripts. Typically, a media server receives a call, obtains the appropriate VoiceXML page from a dedicated local or remote server and then executes the VoiceXML page for the caller
The centralization of such IVR resources makes the administration and maintenance of these resources more efficient and also potentially more reliable due to centralized fault monitoring. Furthermore, the redundancy provided by most IVR systems helps to ensure the continued availability of the customer service capabilities that are critical to the efficient operation of a call center and improves the ability to recover from a failure by allowing IVR tasks to continue on an alternate device upon a detected failure A centralized implementation also allows efficient maintenance of the IVR application processes, including the proprietary call flows and scripting languages, which may require modification or upgrade. IVR systems must typically interface with various subsystems required by the call center, including digital and analog voice circuits, dual tone multiple frequency (DTMF) processing systems, speech recognition systems and text-to-speech processing systems Thus, the specialized circuitry required by the IVR systems to interface with other systems provides additional motivation for such centralized designs.
The agents in a call center typically employ computer terminals that are interconnected using a local area network (LAN). When a call is assigned to an available agent, information about the caller or the call (or both), is often routed with the call to the agent's terminal, for presentation to the agent. In this manner; the agent is better prepared to process the call in an efficient manner with up-to-date call-specific information. It has been found that the processing resources distributed among the various agents in a call center are generally under utilized as agents perform call processing functions
A need therefore exists for a method and apparatus for distributing IVR functions among the agent terminals in a call center. A further need exists for a method and apparatus for creating an IVR system using spare processor cycles from agent terminals to supplement or replace centralized or dedicated IVR servers.